Grasses are spendthrifts, forests are budgeters, in a nuanced account of plant water use
Peer-Reviewed Publication
Updates every hour. Last Updated: 27-Dec-2025 08:11 ET (27-Dec-2025 13:11 GMT/UTC)
Even a toddler knows that plants need water. It’s perhaps the first thing we learn about these green lifeforms. But how plants budget this resource varies considerably. The kapok trees of the Amazon have adopted vastly different strategies than the switchgrass of the American plains. Unfortunately, it’s hard to directly measure which ones prevail in different ecosystem types and how they shift under changing conditions.
In a paper published in Science Bulletin, an international team of scientists reported a series of basaltic lavas and picrites with E-MORB/OIB affinities from the Qilian-Qinling Accretionary Belt, Central China. They have recorded a 150-Myr development history of the Proto-Tethys Ocean from opening at ~620 Ma to continuous spreading at ~470 Ma.
Increasing solar power generation in the United States by 15% could lead to an annual reduction of 8.54 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, according to researchers at Rutgers, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Stony Brook University.
For generations, farmers have used natural materials such as lime, gypsum and manure to improve their soil for growing crops. Now, a team of researchers led by the University of Missouri is giving new purpose to an established material — biochar, a charcoal-like substance made from leftover plant waste — and showing how it can address challenges facing today’s cotton growers. Even though biochar has been used in various forms of agriculture for thousands of years, this study focused on how it could help cotton farmers in the delta region of the United States, often called the Mississippi Delta.
A huge flood triggered by the rapid draining of a lake beneath the Greenland ice sheet occurred with such force that it fractured the ice above and burst out across its surface.
This phenomenon, observed for the first time in Greenland and detailed in research published today (Wednesday, July 30) in the journal Nature Geoscience, sheds new light on the destructive potential of meltwater stored beneath the ice sheet.
It reveals how, under extreme conditions, water flooding underneath the ice can force its way upwards through the ice and escape at the ice sheet surface.